When I was in my final year of college, I had a roommate who owned a cat. On the face of it, this was no big deal. I loved cats, and for the most part, this one was pretty agreeable. There was just one issue that there was (quite literally) no getting around—while everybody was sleeping at night, he had a habit of leaving a noxious pile of diarrhea right beside our front door.  

As you might imagine, it was not a pleasant experience waking up bright and early for a library study session and having to step over toxic waste before even getting the chance to enjoy a morning coffee. The one saving grace of the situation, if you could call it that, was that my roommate was committed to the unpleasant task of cleaning up the mess. We could argue that this may be the bare minimum, but hey! As anybody who has lived with roommates knows, some of them refuse to meet even the lowest bar.